Electronic systems and circuits have made a significant contribution towards the advancement of modern society and are utilized in a number of applications to achieve advantageous results. Numerous electronic technologies such as digital computers, calculators, audio devices, video equipment, and telephone systems facilitate increased productivity and cost reduction in analyzing and communicating data, ideas and trends in most areas of business, science, education and entertainment. Frequently, these activities often involve the dissemination of information through the presentation of various graphics images on a display.
The operations performed by graphics pipeline stages associated with rendering an image can be very complex and as demands for ever better and faster graphics rendering grow the amount of processing operations and information involved typically increase. For example, the size of textures (e.g., 1 million by 1 million texels and larger) utilized by applications have grown significantly and often are much larger than practical capacities of system memories resulting in only a small portion of possible texture information being resident in memory. In addition, even if enough memory is provided, loading or swapping the large amounts of texture information into memory usually takes significant amounts of time slowing down the texture operations. Significant interference with the timing of the texture operations can result in diminished presentation performance and user experience.